High PR Homepage - Are there still too many internal links?

Hi,

First post here. Glad to be a part of the community. A site I do the majority of my SEO work for, Roomorama, provides short term apartment rentals in major cities.

Right now, the homepage links to internal city specific landing pages that I hope to rank for. This has worked well, though as the company expands to many other cities, the footer links that spread the homepage PR are starting to look spammy. Once Roomorama opens to hundreds of cities, will all of these links still pass PR? Any thoughts on how to approach the issue? Will the SE's look down on these footer links? Thanks in advance,

Jim

If you use a logical hierarchy there should be no problem. One thing many people often overlook is the use of internal links, they can be very powerful if you have a lot of them, and they're organized properly.

I'm not sure why you have the sub folder /short-term-rentals with no landing page there, so I would fix that and make it the landing page for all your cities.

For a while the paths for our users was domain/username so we couldnt have anything at the top level like that. Now we could but would require a redirect.

And why do you think that would be a good landing page for ALL of our cities? I can see something like /boston-short-term-rentals for just Boston short term rentals being helpful but after speaking with our developer, he thinks that could possibly interfere with other internal systems.

He suggested subdomains, ie city.roomorama, which may be a good idea. Any thoughts on subdomains vs. /short-term-rentals/city for landing pages?

Hi guys,

Interesting question so I thought I'd give my opinion (I'm willing to stand corrected!).

Firstly:



Well for starters, if you hope to list within search for phrases such as 'short term rentals in *location*' then you will potentially stand a higher chance if you have separate landing pages for each location. IMO you are better off creating individual landing pages specifically targeted towards the specific location i.e. with unique content, (not the same content simply alternating the name of the location!), displaying location specific rentals etc. This way you stand to build authoritative pages which you can tailor for each location rather than simply listing all locations on a single page which is 'generically' focused towards rentals.

As for the sub-domains (and this is where I will stand corrected if necessary); I would not personally recommend this option. A sub-domain is technically a different domain, outside the main website which holds its own authority; therefore if you are creating a single landing page on the sub-domain it would potentially hold little benefit. If you are planning on creating a 'micro site' on the sub-domain on each location holding lots of page containing lots of information the maybe this is a suitable option; however if you are planning on creating a single landing page for each location I would keep it within the main domain and build the authority of these pages.

As for the number of links per page; I personally keep links per page to a maximum of 100 a per Googles guidelines. This may be a bit outdated now so if anyone has any info please share?!

Hope this help and I look forward to any other opinions.

Chris

Thanks for the thoughts Chris. Re: the city specific landing pages, that is in fact what we have.

So roomorama/short-term-rentals/boston for example ranks for boston short term rentals and the same goes for almost all of our other cities. Something like 90-95% of those pages rank on page 1 of Google for those keywords.

And I'm glad to get your thoughts on the subdomain issue. This is my intuition that it wouldnt be a great idea, esp because we are doing fine for the city specific landing pages already.

And I have heard the 100 link rule and thats why I wanted to see if people thought it mattered, given that I also heard the search engines will follow more links for authoritative pages.

Thanks for the input.

I'm kinda hoping other people will provide there opinion here because I'm quite interested in other peoples thoughts here.

IMO you need to bear in mind that PR is (theoretically at least) dispersed via each hyperlink on-page; the more hyperlinks you have, the more the PR gets diluted between them. Again IMO you should keep top-level navigation focused towards the primary target pages to channel PR directly to the most important pages, and use contextual linking throughout the site to promote other internal pages where applicable.

Of course this is open to much debate hence why I want people to respond :-)

Chris

PS:



Spot on! If its working 90%-95% of the time why change it! :-)

Chris

No!!!! - subdomains are a perfectly good and reasonable way to subdivide your web site into themes in many situations. site.com/widgets is not in any way treated differently than widgets.site.com/. You are right to say that there is no reason for the OP to change from the existing strategy, but its not for the reason given.

The idea that each subdomain has its own discreet authority is just wrong.

I know you have had a rough ride here and clearly you have some experience *but* while your parentheses let you off the hook *to an extent*. You won't gain friends here by speculating where you don't know the answer (because it is a waste of everyones bandwidth).

In the thread you can see that, despite your qualification, you've clearly re-inforced a false view in the OPs mind absent this interruption.

I appreciate your openness but the forum functions best when thoughtful questions are answered by focussed, authoritative opinions.

That is good advice. Less is more. As much as possible restrict your advice to what you *know* to be true. There are lots of common sense reasons why this is obviously the right approach.